Design Thinking: Challenges for Software Requirements Elicitation

Abstract

Agile methods fit well for software development teams in the requirements elicitation activities. It has brought challenges to organizations in adopting the existing traditional methods, as well as new ones. Design Thinking has been used as a requirements elicitation technique and immersion in the process areas, which brings the client closer to the software project team and enables the creation of better projects. With the use of data triangulation, this paper brings a literature review that collected the challenges in software requirements elicitation in agile methodologies and the use of Design Thinking. The result gave way to a case study in a Brazilian public organization project, via user workshop questionnaire with 20 items, applied during the study, in order to identify the practice of Design Thinking in this context. We propose here an overview of 13 studied challenges, from which eight presented strong evidence of contribution (stakeholders involvement, requirements definition and validation, schedule, planning, requirement details and prioritization, and interdependence), three presented partial evidence of contribution and two were not eligible for conclusions (non-functional requirements, use of artifacts, and change of requirements). The main output of this work is to present an analysis of the use of Design Thinking to see if it fits properly to be used as a means of solving the challenges of elicitation of software requirements when using agile methods.

Understanding general concepts of requirements engineering through design thinking: An experimental study with students

“…The qualitative and quantitative analysis showed that successful implementation of Scrum and DT helped achieve 100% of users' satisfaction and average completeness of 95%. In 2019, Martins et al [16] presented a study that provided details of DT challenges in the software requirement elicitation. The authors have identified 31 DT techniques and assessed their applications.…”

“…Recently, DT has started to find its place in software engineering (SE) education as academicians have included DT methods for project‐based learning, requirements elicitation activities, application developments, and so on, to enhance the skill set of the students [6, 20, 36, 38]. The dispersion of the DT knowledge in academia is still limited as it is marginally included in SE education, especially in the RE activities [16]. A few works explored the use of DT methods for the effective RE process, but knowledge of DT's specific role in RE practices remains unclear, and little is known now about how DT and RE integration could be realized.…”

Understanding the factors that influence software testing through moments of translation

“…As explained, software testing can be conducted manually or automatically using software testing tools. Generally, there are numerous challenges in testing software (Ferreira Martins et al , 2019).…”

Improving a method to analyze the requirements for an information system for consistency

“…It should be noted that the organization of close interaction between a customer and an analyst in the course of analysis of requirements in accordance with the provisions of modern Agile-methods does not make it possible to improve the effectiveness of this analysis. As shown in paper [5], nowadays, the application of the Agile-methods of IT-project management can have a certain positive effect only in the course of works on the detection of functional requirements. However, during the planning and execution of other works, related to the requirements, the effect of the application of Agile-methods is not proved [5].…”

“…As shown in paper [5], nowadays, the application of the Agile-methods of IT-project management can have a certain positive effect only in the course of works on the detection of functional requirements. However, during the planning and execution of other works, related to the requirements, the effect of the application of Agile-methods is not proved [5].…”